Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Quotes

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

Any company has got to reinvent itself again and again.

Managers are trained to make incremental, programmatic improvements. They aren't trained to lead large-scale change.

You don't implement change easily in Japan unless you explain very clearly why you need to do this change, how you're going to do this change and what's going to be the outcome of this change. If you offset or you forget to explain one of these three steps you're not going to do it.

We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

It all sounds almost silly, but the fact is that the only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it.

I think there are certain business matters which we must now conduct differently than we used to.

Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.

There was a point in time when I was in dire need of changing the way the model agency was working.

I am honored to be able to serve GM at this critical juncture and take part in its reinvention.

We do as much harm holding onto programs and people past their natural life span as we do when we employ massive organizational air strikes. However, destroying comes at the end of life's cycle, not as a first response.

Most of the clubs I have had, they have been in a precarious situation when I have taken over and I have had to change it, even going back to Scarborough and all that.

When you're in a turnaround situation, you cannot incrementalize your way out of it.

Any company faces big challenges during transformation. People are accustomed to going ahead on the existing track. Even when they know there are problems, the first reaction is to protect the old way.

When a new coaching staff comes in, there are a lot of changes that happen with that.

If I can impact an executive and his or her team, I can help to change the culture of an organization.

I have been reorganizing and restructuring AOL: changing the strategy and rebuilding it from scratch in the worst economy in a generation.

Well, if you look back, in almost two and a half years, the biggest change probably was in late 2000 when we decided to totally change the CA business model.

I've always been intellectually restless, but it is the building part of it that most interests me. It is the constructing of the team that is my favorite part. Anyone who is familiar with the history of the A's franchise, even dating back to Philadelphia, knows that every five or 10 years, you have to tear it apart and rebuild it.

Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

To me, success in the job is setting a vision, guiding an organization through change - which is exactly what I did at Digitas, and I'm very proud of that - and bringing people together and with you. That, to me, is what it takes to be successful.

In any business that grows big on one business model, transitions can throw everything in the air.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.